52 Cool Facts About Social Media

As social media continues to gain acceptance as a bona-fide communications platform, I thought it might be fun to have a cool fact about it for every week of the year.

So, here are ten facts about the five most well-known social media outlets – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogging – with two more bonus facts thrown in just for fun. (And to get to the figure of a fact a week for a year).

Enjoy!

Facebook

1. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. 2. More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) is shared each month. 3. Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application. 4. More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month. 5. Two-thirds of comScore?s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore?s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook. 6. There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. 7. People that access Facebook via mobile are twice as active than non-mobile users (think about that when designing your Facebook page). 8. The average Facebook user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events. 9. People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook. 10. There are more than 1 million entrepreneurs and developers from 180 countries on Facebook.

Statistics from Facebook press office.

Twitter

11. Twitter’s web platform only accounts for a quarter of its users – 75% use third-party apps. 12. Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day. 13. There are currently 110 million users of Twitter’s services. 14. Twitter receives 180 million unique visits each month. 15. There are more than 600 million searches on Twitter every day. 16. Twitter started as a simple SMS-text service. 17. Over 60% of Twitter use is outside the U.S. 18. There are more than 50,000 third-party apps for Twitter. 19. Twitter has donated access to all of its tweets to the Library of Congress for research and preservation. 20. More than a third of users access Twitter via their mobile phone.

LinkedIn

21. LinkedIn is the oldest of the four sites in this post, having been created on May 5 2003. 22. There are more than 70 million users worldwide. 23. Members of LinkedIn come from more than 200 countries from every continent. 24. LinkedIn is available in six native languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. 25. Oracle’s Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Epstein, was headhunted for the position via his LinkedIn profile. 26. 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool. 27. A new member joins LinkedIn every second. 28. LinkedIn receives almost 12 million unique visitors per day. 29. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn. 30. Recruiters account for 1-in-20 LinkedIn profiles.

YouTube

31. The very first video uploaded was called “Me at the Zoo”, on 23rd April 2005. 32. By June 2006, more than 65,000 videos were being uploaded every day. 33. YouTube receives more than 2 billion viewers per day. 34. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. 35. The U.S. accounts for 70% of YouTube users. 36. Over half of YouTube’s users are under 20 years old. 37. You would need to live for around 1,000 years to watch all the videos currently on YouTube. 38. YouTube is available in 19 countries and 12 languages. 39. Music videos account for 20% of uploads. 40. YouTube uses the same amount of bandwidth as the entire Internet used in 2000.

Statistics from YouTube press centre.

Blogging

41. 77% of Internet users read blogs. 42. There are currently 133 million blogs listed on leading blog directory Technorati. 43. 60% of bloggers are between the ages 18-44. 44. One in five bloggers update their blogs daily. 45. Two thirds of bloggers are male. 46. Corporate blogging accounts for 14% of blogs. 47. 15% of bloggers spend 10 hours a week blogging. 48. More than half of all bloggers are married and/or parents. 49. More than 50% of bloggers have more than one blog. 50. Bloggers use an average of five different social sites to drive traffic to their blog.

Bonus Facts

So there you have it – a fact for every week of the year, just in case you need it for your next presentation or tweet-up, and want to let folks know why social media isn’t so dorky after all. And as an added bonus, here are some ways you can use these stats for your business’s strategy.